Citation

Taubert J, van Golde C, Verstraten FA. Iperception 2017; 8(1): e2041669517690411.

Affiliation

The School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/2041669517690411

PMID

28203355

PMCID

PMC5298513

Abstract

The speed and ease with which we recognize the faces of our friends and family members belies the difficulty we have recognizing less familiar individuals. Nonetheless, overconfidence in our ability to recognize faces has carried over into various aspects of our legal system; for instance, eyewitness identification serves a critical role in criminal proceedings. For this reason, understanding the perceptual and psychological processes that underlie false identification is of the utmost importance. Gaze direction is a salient social signal and direct eye contact, in particular, is thought to capture attention. Here, we tested the hypothesis that differences in gaze direction may influence difficult decisions in a lineup context. In a series of experiments, we show that when a group of faces differed in their gaze direction, the faces that were making eye contact with the participants were more likely to be misidentified. Interestingly, this bias disappeared when the faces are presented with their eyes closed. These findings open a critical conversation between social neuroscience and forensic psychology, and imply that direct eye contact may (wrongly) increase the perceived familiarity of a face.

Language: en

Keywords

applied visual science; eye gaze direction; eyewitness identification; face perception; legal procedures; misidentification